Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Japan goes digital after turning off analogue TV
Consumers jam a section of an electronics shop selling televisions with a sign informing customers that two days remain before the country will end analog broadcasts, in central Tokyo on July 22. Japan shifted to digital terrestrial broadcasting, switching off its analogue television network in all areas except those worst hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the government said.

Japan on Sunday shifted to digital terrestrial broadcasting, switching off its analogue television network in all areas except those worst hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the government said.
Japanese broadcasters ended analogue transmission across most of the country at noon (0900 GMT) after 58 years. No major problems among viewers were immediately reported.
As of the end of June, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry believed at least 290,000 households were still not ready to receive digital signals, Jiji Press said.
The Japanese government has postponed the move to digital in the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima until the end of March next year due to damage from the earthquake and tsunami.(c) 2011 AFP

NASA's iPad app beams science straight to usersNASA's world-leading climate and Earth science research comes to life through visualized satellite data. New stories, mostly based on Earth science, will publish to the app every Tuesday and Thursday. Credit: NASA Goddard.

NASA satellites beam data from space; now the Agency is beaming it straight to your iPad.
Software and media specialists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today released a new iPad app — the NASA Visualization Explorer — that allows users to easily interact with extraordinary images, video, and information about NASA's latest Earth science research.
Cutting-edge visualization has long been a staple of NASA Earth science and in particular the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at Goddard Space Flight Center. The iPad presented NASA a new and easily accessible way to put stunning and beautiful Earth science visualizations directly in people's hands.
The app's science features will include high-resolution movies and stills and short written stories to put all the pieces in context. Most of the movies are simply real satellite data, visualized. Other features will include interviews with scientists or imagery from supercomputer modeling efforts. The app includes social networking interfaces, including links to Facebook and Twitter, for easy sharing of stories.
The application is free to the public and available from the App Store via iTunes.
The app editorial team plans to develop two new science features per week. After publishing an initial batch of six features with the launch, new features will publish to the app on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the future the app could include occasional stories about the Sun, the other planets in our Solar System, and exotic objects far out in the cosmos.
The Goddard team designed the application essentially as a mobile multimedia magazine. "Its one-of-a-kind content is geared to the general public, students, educators — "anyone interested in the natural world," said Michael Starobin, a senior producer at Goddard Space Flight Center who spearheaded the app's editorial direction."The app will explore stories of climate change, Earth's dynamic systems, plant life on land and in the oceans -- all of the small and large stories captured in data by NASA satellites and then visualized."
"Science should be accessible to everyone, and visualization reveals the meaning and value of the often intangible, but essential, data delivered by NASA's research efforts," Starobin said. "Data visualization makes information immediately visual and understandable when it otherwise might go unnoticed, and the app makes it easy to explore in an engaging, easy-to-consume, thoroughly modern style."
"The NASA visualization app is the latest step in a rich tradition of content production and application development," added Project Manager Helen-Nicole Kostis. "With its release, I'm inviting everyone on a journey of scientific knowledge and visual wonder."
Work began on the NASA Visualization Explorer shortly after Apple released its electronic tablet in April 2010. "We just knew immediately that the iPad provided the perfect platform to showcase NASA science," said Christopher Smith, the principal designer of the application's user interface.
Administrators of Goddard's Inclusive Innovation Program agreed. The pilot program, which Goddard management rolled out last year to support ideas that would advance non-science and non-engineering functions and services, awarded seed funding to the team to develop the concept. "Our evaluation process was rigorous," said Goddard Chief Technologist Peter Hughes, who administered the program for the center. "This proposal stood out for its immediate utility and potential impact."
With the one-year funding in hand, the three principal creators assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts from the center's SVS, one of the nation's premiere data visualization labs, and the center's Television and Multimedia Department, which has earned a reputation as one of the federal government's best media-production departments. "Through our team's unique talents, I believe we've created an application that is worthy of the NASA badge," Starobin said.

When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is active, it allows the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) to take into account health benefits as well as taste when it assigns a value to a particular food.You're trying to decide what to eat for dinner. Should it be the chicken and broccoli? The super-sized fast-food burger? Skip it entirely and just get some Rocky Road.
Making that choice, it turns out, is a complex neurological exercise. But, according to researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), it's one that can be influenced by a simple shifting of attention toward the healthy side of life. And that shift may provide strategies to help us all make healthier choices—not just in terms of the foods we eat, but in other areas, like whether or not we pick up a cigarette.
Their research is described in a paper published in the July 27 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
When you decide what to eat, not only does your brain need to figure out how it feels about a food's taste versus its health benefits versus its size or even its packaging, but it needs to decide the importance of each of those attributes relative to the others. And it needs to do all of this more-or-less instantaneously.
When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is active, it allows the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) to take into account health benefits as well as taste when it assigns a value to a particular food.
[Credit: Caltech/Hare, et. al.]
Antonio Rangel, professor of economics and neuroscience at Caltech, has been studying this value-deriving and decision-making process for years now. Along with Todd Hare—a former postdoc at Caltech who is now an assistant professor of neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland—he published a paper in Science in 2009 describing differences in the brains of people who are better at exercising self-control than others. What they found was that while everyone uses the same area of the brain—the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC—to make value-laden decisions like what to munch on, there's a second brain area—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or dlPFC—that seems to come to life when a person is using self-control during the decision-making process.
In other words, when the dlPFC is active, it allows the vmPFC to take into account health benefits as well as taste when it assigns a value to a particular food.
Provided by California Institute of Technology

Now that Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Mango” update has reached the release-to-manufacturing milestone, the company’s hardware partners need to ensure the enhanced software can play nicely with their next-generation devices. The consequences of a bumpy rollout are potentially dire for Windows Phone, which is struggling for market share against determined competitors such as Google Android and the Apple iPhone.

“Earlier this morning, the Windows Phone development team officially signed off on the release to manufacturing (RTM) build of ‘Mango’—the latest version of the Windows Phone operating system,” Microsoft executive Terry Myerson wrote in a July 26 posting on The Windows Blog. “”Here on the Windows Phone team, we now turn to preparing for the update process.”

The blog posting doesn’t offer a definitive release date for Mango, although executives have previously cited a fall timeframe. Microsoft doubtlessly hopes that pushing Mango onto users’ devices will proceed far more smoothly than previous Windows Phone updates, which were marked by delays and complaints of stalled or “bricked” devices.

Despite Windows Phone’s falling market share, Microsoft is determined to put a brave face on the platform’s marketplace prospects. During a July 11 keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference, CEO Steve Ballmer described that market share as “very small,” but insisted that other metrics (such as consumer satisfaction) boded well for Windows Phone overall.

“Nine out of 10 people who bought Windows Phone would absolutely recommend it to a friend,” he said, reiterating a talking point voiced by many a Microsoft executive over the past few months. “People in the phone business seem to believe in us.”

Nonetheless, for the three-month period between the end of February and the end of May, research firm comScore estimated Microsoft’s U.S. share dipping from 7.7 percent to 5.8 percent. If accurate, that comes despite the marketing push behind the Windows Phone platform.

During that same timeframe, Google Android jumped from 33 percent to 38.1 percent of the market, and Apple rose slightly from 25.2 percent to 26.6 percent. Research In Motion slide from 28.9 percent to 24.7 percent.

Microsoft is also hoping that its deal with Nokia to port Windows Phone onto the latter’s smartphones will translate into increased adoption, although the Finnish phone-maker’s falling market share suggests an uphill battle in making that a reality.

Mango’s new features include a redesigned Xbox Live Hub, home-screen tiles capable of displaying up-to-the-minute information, the ability to consolidate friends and colleagues into groups, and visual voicemail, for a grand total of 500 new elements in all. Samsung, HTC, LG Electronics and Nokia have all committed to building new Windows Phone devices preloaded with Mango, while Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE have reportedly agreed to produce Windows Phone units for the first time.

How early reptiles moved
This is a fossil of Orobates pabsti, that was found at the Bromacker. This early reptile lived 270 to 290 million years ago. In a new research project Jena zoologists and researcher of the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha try to find out how these reptiles moved. Credit: Jan-Peter Kasper/FSU.Jena (Germany) Modern scientists would have loved the sight of early reptiles running across the Bromacker near Tambach-Dietharz (Germany) 300 million years ago. Unfortunately this journey through time is impossible. But due to Dr. Thomas Martens and his team from the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha numerous skeletons and footprints of early dinosaurs have been found and conserved there during the last forty years.
"It is the most important find spot of primitive quadruped vertebrates from the Perm in Europe," says Professor Dr. Martin S. Fischer from the University Jena (Germany). The evolutionary biologist and his team together with the Gotha scientists and other partners are now starting a research project not only to analyze the locomotion of these primeval saurians. They also want to set them back into motion – at least in animation. The Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) will support the project with about 288.000 Euro during the next two years. "Our first major palaeontologic project", as zoologist Fischer delightedly calls it.
The fossils found on the Bromacker date back to the oldest fully terrestrial vertebrates. These so-called amniotes are the first real "land-dwelling animals". This became possible through a first evolutionary step in which they laid a completely encapsulated egg in whose 'watery inside' the offspring could develop. Therefore tadpoles and gills became redundant. "The Bromacker fossils are the closest relatives of the last mutual ancestor of the amniotes that have been found so far," Dr. John A. Nyakatura, who oversees the new research project points out, stressing the evolutionary-biological importance of the finds. How did the locomotion system of those amniotes change? They are according to Nyakatura "pivotal to the genealogical tree for evolutionary biologists". The Jena expert in locomotion research says the crucial questions of the new project are: "Which functionally anatomical consequences does ,cutting the cord' to water have for the locomotion system of the animals?"
The Jena zoologists and their partners in Gotha, Dresden (both Germany), England and the USA wanted to find out. In their research they cannot only rely on years of expertise but also on one of the fastest X-ray video systems worldwide, which is used at the Friedrich Schiller University. With the help of this system, Dr. Nyakatura and the Paleo-Biomechanist Dr. Vivian Allen who will change from London to Jena in autumn, plan to analyze the locomotion systems of diverse animals resembling the early reptiles. They will observe skinks, tiger salamanders, green iguanas and small crocodiles. In order to do so the animals will move on a treadmill in front of the X-ray video camera that can take up to 2.000 pictures per seconds. Moreover the pressure on the joints will be investigated and footprints will be generated on wet clay. At the end of these analysis a comprehensive locomotion profile of the species is to be created – which in itself will bring science forward.
The protocol of the footprints will then be compared to the primeval footprints, in order to get an understanding of the early saurians movements. "And this in turn will allow conclusions to be drawn about the find spot and what happened there," Dr. Martens adds. This is only possible because the Gotha researchers could not only recover numerous footprints but also complete skeletons of unique quality. "The fossils are mind-blowing," Nyakatura stresses. The entire animal relics encapsulated in stone slabs are being scanned with the help of the TU Dresden in order to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the skeletons. At the end of the project animated studies of the early saurians will be generated from the scans and the locomotion protocols. "Thanks to the support of the VolkswagenStiftung and the co-operation with the University Jena we will finally be able to give an insight into the world of the early saurians to the visitors of the 'Museum of Nature' in Schloss Friedenstein," says Dr. Martin Eberle, director of the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha. Now the researchers are hoping their project will be successful so that they cannot only mount an exhibition on the subject in two years' time. They will also be able to travel 300 million years back in time due to the innovative animations – and they will watch the early reptiles running.
Provided by Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet Jena

Life of International Space Station (ISS) will be finshed at 2020.Russia and its partners plan to plunge the International Space Station (ISS) into the ocean at the end of its life cycle after 2020 so as not to leave space junk, its space agency said Wednesday.

ISS to be sunk after 2020: Russian space agency

"After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish," said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov.
"Right now we've agreed with our partners that the station will be used until approximately 2020," he said in comments released on Wednesday.Space junk is becoming an increasingly serious headache.
A piece of space debris narrowly missed the space station last month in a rare incident that forced the six-member crew to scramble to their rescue craft.
The ISS, which orbits 350 kilometres (220 miles) above Earth, is a sophisticated platform for scientific experiments bringing together space agencies from Russia, the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
Launched in 1998, the ISS was initially expected to remain in space for 15 years until an agreement was reached to keep it operating through 2020.
By going into a watery grave, the ISS will repeat the fate of its predecessor space station Mir, which Russia sank in the Pacific Ocean in 2001 after 15 years of service.
Moscow this month proclaimed the beginning of "the era of the Soyuz" after the US shuttle's last flight left the Russian system as the sole means for delivering astronauts to the ISS.
Russia is currently developing a new space ship to replace the Soyuz capsule which is single-use, except for the section in which spacemen return to Earth, said Davydov.
Tests of the ship will begin after 2015 and it will have "elements of multi-use whose level will be much higher than they are today," he said, adding that Russia will compete with the United States in building the new-generation ship.
"We'll race each other."
Davydov said it remains unclear what will come after the ISS and whether mankind will see the need for a replacement orbiting close to Earth.
"Lots of our tasks are still linked to circumterrestrial space," he said, while adding that a new space station could be used as a base for building complexes that will explore deeper into space.
"I cannot rule out that it will be used to put together, create the complexes that in the future will fly to the Moon and Mars," he said, stressing that "a serious exploration" could not be done without manned flights. (c) 2011 AFP

Friday, July 22, 2011

The animation, derived from SMOS satellite data, shows soil moisture in the Horn of Africa from April to mid-July 2011. The orange and yellow colouring depicts little to no moisture, while green and blue depict higher levels of soil moisture. Credits: CESBIO/ESA

Drought in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti is pushing tens of thousands of people from their homes as millions face food insecurity in a crisis visible from space. ESA’s SMOS satellite shows that the region’s soil is too dry to grow crops.

Somalis, who already face war in their country, have been fleeing to neighbouring countries in search of refuge. In Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, for example, over 1000 people – mostly children – arrive daily, severely dehydrated and malnourished.
While international aid agencies call this the ‘worst drought in decades,’ space technology has mapped the crisis over a shorter time period.
ESA's SMOS soil moisture and ocean salinity satellite shows that Somalia’s soil appears dry during the 2011 main rainy season, particularly in the southern agricultural region.
Somalia has an arid climate in the northeast and central regions, while the northwest and south receive at least reasonable amounts of rain in a normal year.
Although the country’s proximity to the equator means there is not much seasonal variation in climate, the April to June rains are important for agriculture.Enlarge

This animation compares soil moisture data from each month in 2010 to the 20-year monthly average. The shades of red represent varying degrees of lower than normal soil moisture in 2010 compared to the past 20 years, while the shades of blue indicate higher than normal soil moisture. These data were provided by the WACMOS project. Credits: WACMOS

But this year, the rains were insufficient for cultivating crops. SMOS shows that there was little or no moisture in surface soil in some key areas between April and July.

“The SMOS measurements in such areas are probably two to four times more accurate than those with other satellite sensors or models,” said Yann Kerr, SMOS lead scientist for soil moisture at the CESBIO centre for studying Earth’s biosphere from space in Toulouse, France.
Launched in November 2009, SMOS is helping us to understand Earth’s water cycle with its specialised sensor.

Additional information on soil moisture gathered over the last 20 years by various instruments reveal the lead-up to this year’s dry spell in the Horn of Africa.
In the final months of 2010, the soil moisture was lower than average in areas covering Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia.
The consequences of this drought are dire: crops have failed, livestock are dwindling and the people are starving.
Further aggravating the situation in Somalia, political unrest has been driving people from their lands for years – the few tended crops do not always reach maturity or are destroyed. Droughts in Southern & Eastern Africa.

The countries of southern and eastern Africa have very different climates, but most are situated in semi-arid regions where annual rainfall varies by 20-30 percent. This variation can have devastating social and economic consequences. In most of the area, agricultural production in mainly limited by the availability of soil moisture. Heavy rains often do not significantly increase soil moisture because the soil does not absorb moisture quickly, and the rain tends to run off without penetrating into the soil. The problems are aggravated by the tendency of 2-3 year droughts to occur at fairly regular intervals.

Evidence for a strong link to El Niño events and African drought is conflicting. Over the 1875-1975, 27 El Niño events were linked to 21 years of deficient rainfall in southern and eastern Africa. The 1982-83 El Niño was also linked to drought in Africa. More detailed attempts to link the two phenomena have not been successful.

Anonymous' fires back at hacker huntersNotorious hacker group Anonymous on posted a defiant message to police Thursday and boasted of plundering sensitive data from NATO computers.

"We are not scared anymore," read an online message that purported to be a response by Anonymous and splinter group Lulz Security.
"Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea... there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- you can possibly do to make us stop."
As if to underscore the point, a message posted at a Twitter account by "AnonymousIRC" claimed to have looted about a gigabyte of NATO data that even the rebel hacker group deemed too sensitive to release.
"Yes, we haz (sic) more of your delicious data," the Twitter post read. "You call it war; we laugh at your battleships."
US authorities arrested 16 people for cyber crimes on Tuesday, including 14 over an online attack on the PayPal website claimed by Anonymous.
The US indictment against the 14 hackers alleges the denial of service (DDoS) attacks on PayPal were "retribution" because the site terminated a donation account for the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks.
Anonymous hackers called the PayPal attacks "Operation Avenge Assange," in reference to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the indictment said, adding that the US raids were coordinated with police in Britain and the Netherlands.
The PayPal attack suspects were arrested during raids in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and the US capital Washington.
The cyber attackers used aliases such as "Toxic," "Reaper," "Anthrophobic" and "No."
Separately, two suspects were arrested under similar indictments in Florida and New Jersey, while British police arrested one suspect and Dutch police four.
In all, FBI agents made 35 raids across the United States as part of a probe into "coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations," the FBI said, adding that to date more than 75 searches have been carried out.

Engineering a new face after injuryEvolution of a patient's recovery from facial injury through the use of topological optimization. Credit: Hanlon, Beckman ITG, University of Illinois.

Today, surgeons face many limitations when it comes to helping a patient who suffers from a severe craniofacial injury, or an injury pertaining to the skull and the face. Most often a result of cancer or war-related circumstances, the injury is both psychologically and physically damaging.injury to face
Will the patients ever recover their appearance? Or more importantly, recover their ability to speak, breathe or eat correctly again?
Rebuilding the delicate facial bone structure of an individual is a complicated procedure. The surgeon constructs a facial frame with bone from other parts of the body (called autologous tissue), in order to guarantee the functionality of the specialized organs responsible for vital roles such as breathing, seeing, communicating and eating. Since there are no analogous bone structures to a person's face, the procedure depends on experience and skill. As Glaucio Paulino, program director of the mechanics of materials program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), noted, this procedure does not always generate the desired outcome. injury to neck
"The middle of the face is the most complicated part of the human skeleton," said Paulino. "What makes the reconstruction more complicated is the fact that the bones are small, delicate, highly specialized and located in a region highly susceptible to contamination by bacteria."Facial bones are unique and using bone tissue extracted from different parts of the body, such as the bones of the forearm, isn't the most effective form of recovery.
"The patient may be improved, but still suffer from significant deformity," said Paulino.

Implementation of loads, boundary conditions and different cavity constraints to a design domain and the consequent optimized results. Credit: Glaucio H. Paulino

Mathematical medicine

In contrast, topological optimization is a feasible alternative to make such a recovery possible.
Topological optimization isn't native to the surgery room--it's a mathematical method that uses given loads, the applied force on an area, and boundary conditions or spatial limits, to optimize a specific structure's layout. Imagine a building grid in which you can determine where there should be material and where there shouldn't. Moreover, you can express loads and supports that would affect certain parts of this block of material. Your final result is an optimized structure that fits your established constraints.
This mathematical method is successfully used to engineer spaceships and airplanes. The Airbus 380 wing, for example, was designed with topological optimization. Today, extensive research is underway to apply topological optimization to the engineering of future high-rise buildings. Paulino is responsible for some of the recent advances in this field.
Together with Alok Sutradhar and Michael Miller, from the Ohio State University Medical Center, and Tam Nguyen, from the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois, Paulino is studying how to bring topological optimization to the surgery room. With the recent advances in tissue engineering, Paulino believes that the method can be used to construct patient-specific bone frames.
"The key idea is to have a technique that is tailored for the specific patient. It's not one formula that fits all. People are different, therefore, you cannot have one solution for all patients," said Paulino.Enlarge

Final optimized result with denture inserted into the craniofacial skeleton. Credit: Glaucio H. Paulino

Engineering a face

In an experiment, researchers explored the creation of a three-dimensional structure for a patient with severe gunshot injury. After selecting a design domain from the craniofacial skeleton, supports, loads and cavity constraints (areas with no bone, such as eye cavities) were applied. Topological optimization generated many possible structures to fit the patient-specific requirements.

Watch this video to see the process of creating a structure for a patient with severe gunshot injury using topological optimization. Although the results did not necessarily resemble the natural bone structure, they would preserve the vital functions of facial organs while providing a safe platform for prosthetics and plastic surgery.

The process will "show surgeons their alternatives before going into the operating room," said Paulino.
At the moment, such structures would be built using titanium, which is light and strong. Unfortunately, titanium may cause infections because it's foreign to the body. With future advances in tissue engineering, however, molding human bone tissue into a structure is a possibility. Researchers are still investigating how to ensure that the bone structure created through this process, a living tissue, will maintain the desired shape after implanted in the patient.
Paulino and his team of researchers hope to continue translating applicable concepts between different fields, such as engineering and medicine, to make innovative discoveries. With the development of tissue engineering and topological optimization, in the future, complete recovery from craniofacial injuries will hopefully be enabled by a routine procedure in the surgery room.cody rhodes face injury
cody rhodes, what did rey do to cody rhodes, what happened to cody rhodes face, cody rhodes face injury, cody rhodes source, what happen to cody rhodes face, cody rhodes dashi, unnatural cody rhodes, smackdonw mcintyre london dubbed, smackdown mcintyre london dubbed.

Last week at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Samsung Electronics unveiled the world’s first zero client monitor using Cisco Universal Power Over Ethernet (UPOE) technology, heralding a new era of virtual desktops that will help businesses conserve energy and reduce cost and complexity. The Samsung NC220 monitor with Cisco UPOE powers and connects individual monitors via the network to a “virtualized” central server that executes all tasks and applications, offering businesses a flexible and convenient cloud computing alternative to the traditional workstation setup.

Samsung designed the NC220 with its new LED BLU technology, which offers bright and clear pictures on an ultra-slim, eco-friendly design—and markedly reduces energy consumption when compared with conventional CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) monitors. Such innovations have allowed Samsung to remain the undisputed global leader in monitors for 19 straight quarters, according to a recent report from market research firm IDC.
This easy-to-deploy, easy-to-maintain desktop virtualization system reduces IT burden at every step. Software and security updates can be deployed in minutes from a centralized location, eliminating the need to service each individual workstation. Additionally, the Cisco UPOE technology is designed to enable that both data and power can be supplied through a single Ethernet cable, allowing for easier installation and more flexibility when configuring an office space.
The addition of Cisco UPOE increases flexibility and choice for businesses by extending network power resiliency, at reduced costs compared to traditional power infrastructure, to an unprecedented range of devices. Cisco UPOE can supply up to 60 watts of power—twice as much as existing power-over-Ethernet technologies, which is currently restricted to 30 watts.
“Cisco UPOE doubles the amount power delivered over the Ethernet to support many more devices, including the Samsung zero client desktop virtualization devices,” said Jeff Reed, vice president of Cisco’s Unified Access Business Unit. “Now the same Ethernet cable that provides network access will power Samsung’s industry leading virtual desktop devices—dramatically simplifying deployment and management of these devices.”Enterprises can save additional energy by implementing Cisco’s EnergyWise to better manage and monitor the power consumption of IT devices powered and connected to their Cisco network.
Zero client monitors like the Samsung NC220 are server-based monitors for businesses’ cloud computing systems. These products eliminate the need for local CPU, memory and storage at each individual workstation; instead, the monitor is connected via the network to a central server that executes tasks traditionally handled by a desktop PC. Samsung and Cisco have been working togetherto embed the Cisco UPOE on the Samsung NC220 since the two companies entered into an alliance earlier this year.
Provided by Samsung.

Whether or not NoteSlate ever produces a real product, no barriers remain to a competitor building a tablet purpose-built for sketching and note-taking.

Christopher Mims 07/20/2011

1 Comment

The NoteSlate sketching tablet is coming, even if it won't be built by NoteSlate.

The notoriously secretive, English language-challenged, and so far entirely vaporware company NoteSlate just rumbled to life on its Twitter account, announcing that the company had finally discovered the technology required to realize its vision. Unfortunately, the technology would mean exceeding the device's originally planned price of $99.
The fact that this makes the company, which is apparently nothing more than a website set up by 29-year-old Czech product and furniture designer Martin Hasek, no more likely to ever release a working version of its inexpensive note-taking tablet is irrelevant. Hasek has already completed all the market research any competitor would ever need to justify coming out with a working clone of his vision, and they will.

The Long Nose of Innovation: Bill Buxton

To understand the forces at work here, it helps to understand Bill Buxton's concept of the "long nose" of innovation. The metaphor here is that the "next big thing" is already with us, and it's just slowly poking its nose out before it comes fully into view. Technologies that will be disruptive in the next 10 years are all around us at the research and development stage, because that's how long it takes to perfect a technology and get it to market.
And the already visible "nose" of a viable, inexpensive technology required to realize a tablet that could fully replace paper was just highlighted by Hasek.
Most e-paper has abysmally low refresh rates, far too slow to trace the movement of a stylus on a tablet. But as Hasek pointed out in response to questions from eager fans, the Bridgestone QR-LPD e-paper technology is more than fast enough to do the trick.
So far, Bridgestone's e-paper efforts have gotten a bum rap on account of the company's attempts to sell their screens as an admittedly washed-out alternative to other color e-paper technology. But in grayscale mode, it appears that QR-LPD might be more than adequate for a device like the NoteSlate. What's more, its refresh rate, in evidence at 0:19 in the following video, is more than fast enough to accommodate note-taking and sketching.
Many othere-paperdisplays with similar refresh rates are already on their way. What's significant about e-paper that refreshes fast enough to play video is that it could also be fast enough to respond in a realistic manner, which is exactly what tablets already accomplish, albeit at a much coarser resolution.
Other examples of this technology have already materialized in the form of the countless styluses and note-taking apps for the iPad, the LiveScribe pen computer, and even a ginned-up Magna Doodle for gadget-obsessed adults calling itself the e-note.
What all of these efforts suggest is that there is a very real market desire to digitize absolutely everything, even that last bastion of analog functionality, the blank sheet of paper and the writing device of your choice. Nothing quite satisfies, yet the technology to accomplish the recording and transmission of our every doodle more or less exists already. All that's left is for an OEM to distill those parts into just the device for which consumers have already demonstrated a desire.

Research in Motion is rumoured to be set to follow Apple, Sony and LG into ‘media box’ market .

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is rumoured to be about to launch a new product that will plug in to users’ televisions and stream online video.

The ‘media box, similar to Apple’s TV and products from Sony and LG, is rumoured to be codenamed the ‘BlackBerry Cyclone’.

Media boxes have become increasingly popular because they allow users to put the growing amount of online TV content onto their televisions easily. Most use either a wired or wireless internet connection and an HDMI cable, but they do not generally offer internal storage.

According to the Nerdberry website, the BlackBerry Cyclone will be able to stream NetFlix and YouTube content, as well as access a user’s WiFi network devices.

In the UK, connected devices such as BluRay players also increasingly include apps that allow them to connect to services such as the BBC iPlayer.

BlackBerry has increasingly been focused on making its products appeal to a market that is interested in more than simply emailing. Although the PlayBook tablet has not been as well received as the company may have hoped, it has offered BlackBerry loyalists greater access to gaming than was previously available, for instance.
Apple announced that it has sold more than a million of its TV units late last year, although Steve Jobs has previously referred to the product line as “a hobby”.

Toyota demos 'Window to the World' vehicle back seat smart window technologyDesigners from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and engineers from Toyota have been working together and have come up with a unique and innovative concept they call the "Window to the Word" where the window of the back seat of an automobile is converted into a see-through touch-screen device capable of allowing people, likely children, to draw images with their finger, magnify objects they see outside the car, learn by having objects they touch converted into another language, get distance for objects seen and be given information about objects they see.

Watching the video the team has created of a child using the new technology is both awe inspiring and head scratching. On the one hand, you have to give the designers and engineers credit for even thinking of such a thing, and for portraying it in such a beautiful and simplistic way. But, on the other, the practicalities of such a technology soon surpass the feelings of wonder at this new demonstration of the power of applied technology. Would window smudging ruin the effect after awhile, for example, or would a child bother with it if buckled in so tight that turning to use the window would become a strenuous activity; or would kids prefer to just have a tablet computer on their lap, etc.
Watching the video the team has created of a child using the new technology is both awe inspiring and head scratching. On the one hand, you have to give the designers and engineers credit for even thinking of such a thing, and for portraying it in such a beautiful and simplistic way. But, on the other, the practicalities of such a technology soon surpass the feelings of wonder at this new demonstration of the power of applied technology. Would window smudging ruin the effect after awhile, for example, or would a child bother with it if buckled in so tight that turning to use the window would become a strenuous activity; or would kids prefer to just have a tablet computer on their lap, etc.

Using the new technology, which was demoed at the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association meeting last month, in Belgium, appears to be straightforward and simple. To zoom in on an object, two fingers are spread outwardly from a single point, as on a tablet device. To draw, a single finger is pressed against the window and moved about, again, similar to any other touch-screen. Menuing is controlled via a designated area in the lower left corner of the window. One truly interesting feature is that objects drawn on the window appear to move out of the framed window at the same rate as the car is moving, giving the illusion that the object drawn was actually part of the outside landscape and is being left behind as the car heads off.
Whether or not the “Window to the World” concept ever makes it to real world vehicles, the ideas behind it demonstrate that car manufacturers are intent on using every bit of available technology to make driving, or riding in cars in the future, a better experience for all of us.

Automakers Hope to Make Money on Used EV BatteriesGM and Nissan tout systems to reuse the expensive battery packs.

At $10,000 a piece, electric-carbatteries are too expensive to throw out or recycle into scrap materials. And even after a decade of use, when they can't perform well enough to meet the vehicle's demands, they could still be valuable for other uses. Nissan and GM have both recently announced ways they might make some money from them.
Many issues remain unresolved, not the least of which is whether the automakers would need to buy back the batteries from car owners, or whether dealers would simply lease the battery rather than sell it, which would allow the car company to reclaim it for secondary uses later on.
This week, GM announced a new system that came from its partnership with power electronics and automation giant ABB. The system pairs a battery designed for the Chevrolet Volt with a commercial inverter for interfacing with the power grid. The system employs five to 10 used batteries and could provide a few hours of backup power for homes or small businesses. It could also be used by utilities to help keep the electrical grid working smoothly. Meanwhile, Nissan, as part of a joint venture with the Japanese industrial company Sumitomo, recently announced a system that uses solar panels to charge up batteries. The batteries could then be used to charge electric vehicles, such as the Nissan Leaf, even at night. The system already supplies power to seven charging stations at Nissan's headquarters in Japan, and the company plans to eventually sell smaller charging systems.
But how long the used batteries would last is still in question. The GM-ABB system is being designed to deliver 15 years of use for utilities who want backup energy storage, which can be used to smooth out fluctuations on the grid caused by the variability in power output from solar panels and wind turbines. Over the next few years, GM plans to extensively test the batteries, as well as the electronics that would connect the system to the grid. Pablo Valencia, GM senior manager for battery life-cycle management, says GM will add more battery cells than the system really needs as a way of ensuring that it can deliver adequate energy for 15 years. He thinks the system can last that long because most of the loss in energy capacity happens in the first few years, "then it levels off."

According to battery researchers, as electrodes and electrolytes age, they undergo changes in structure and chemistry that can make their performance harder to predict. That's one reason that warranties on electric-car batteries are limited to eight years. Although lab tests give researchers some idea of how long the batteries will last, no Volts have been on the road long enough to adequately test the batteries' durability.
The economic benefits of reusing the batteries aren't clear, either. Pamela Fletcher, global chief engineer for the Volt, says it's too early to say which options GM might find viable. One challenge is that since the latest EVs just went on sale, their used batteries won't be available in large numbers for eight to 10 years. If the cost of new batteries decreases significantly over that time, as expected, it will be harder for used batteries to compete. Although the used batteries will already have been paid for, there will still be costs involved: they'll have to be removed from the cars and repackaged for grid use, and automakers may also need to pay the car owners for the batteries.

China makes nuclear power breakthrough
China said Friday it had hooked its first so-called "fourth generation" nuclear reactor to the grid, a breakthrough that could eventually reduce its reliance on uranium imports.

The experimental fast-neutron reactor is the result of more than 20 years of research and could also help minimise radioactive waste from nuclear energy, the state-run China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE) said.
China is the ninth country to develop a fast-neutron reactor, which uses uranium 60 times more efficiently than a normal reactor, helping the country to reduce its reliance on imports of the mineral.
Beijing has stepped up investment in nuclear power in an effort to slash its world-leading carbon emissions and scale down the country's heavy reliance on coal, which accounts for 70 percent of its energy needs.
But China's uranium reserves are limited, and it will have to import increasingly large amounts as its civilian nuclear programme gathers speed.
China -- the world's second largest economy -- currently has 14 nuclear reactors and is building more than two dozen others. It aims to get 15 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
According to the World Nuclear Association, it aims to increase nuclear power capacity to 80 gigawatts by 2020 from 10.8 gigawatts in 2010.
The fourth-generation reactor, located just outside Beijing, has a capacity of just 20 megawatts. Other recently launched nuclear reactors in China had a capacity of more than one gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts.
The latest technological step comes after China succeeded in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in an experimental reactor in the northwestern province of Gansu in January.
Authorities said this would help extend the lifespan of proven uranium deposits to 3,000 years from the current forecast of 50-70 years.
Beijing has also pledged to improve emergency procedures and construction standards at its nuclear power plants, after Japan's devastating earthquake and ensuing tsunami triggered an atomic crisis.(c) 2011 AFP

Google Android users can now explore London's streets in 3D follwoing an update to the Google Maps application.
Britain's capital was added this week to the roster of major cities available for viewing in three dimensions via Google Maps 5.0.

Only major buildings in the centre of the capital are currently included in the model, however.

The app was released in December and now allows Android users to drag and tilt their way around more than 100 cities worldwide.

In order to introduce 3D, engineers had to rebuild Google Maps' graphics engine. Previously the app just downloaded two-dimensional maps as a series of image tiles, but now it downloads a vector-based description of the area and draws the map itself.

As well as allowing 3D buildings, the new approach means the app needs to download much less data, useful where mobile broadband coverage is poor or slow.This Week New 3D MAP
Among others, Google also launched 3D maps of Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Singapore and Lisbon this week. The new maps require Android 2.0 or above.

A new paper published in Naturwissenschaft reveals a fossil from 120 million years ago that proves that some lizards were not laying eggs but rather giving birth to live young.

The fossil was discovered by Susan Evans, a professor from the University College London Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, in the Jehol region of Northeast China. This area has revealed hundreds of dinosaur, amphibian, reptile, fish, bird, mammal, invertebrate and plant fossils.
The lizard in this case has been identified as Yabeinosaurus which scientists believe to be similar to the gecko. Evans did not pay much attention to the fossil when it was first discovered but Yuan Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences examined the fossil and discovered 15 tiny fossilized embryos.
The embryos were almost fully developed and the researchers believe that the foot-long mother died only a few days before she would have given birth.
This discovery reveals that some lizards were giving birth to live young in the Early Cretaceous period. Previous fossils have shown that some marine lizards gave birth to live young but this is the first primarily land lizard to be discovered.
“We previously thought that lizards adapted to live birth after mammals, but now it looks like it happened at roughly the same kind of time. This specimen is the oldest we have seen, which implies physiological adaptations, like adequate blood supply to the embryos and very thin shells - or no shells at all - to allow oxygen supply, evolved very early on,” said Professor Susan Evans.
For lizards the added weight throughout the gestational period can limit their movement and ability to flee from predators. This lizard was believed to have lived on a river bank or somewhere close to water where it was able to flee to water in order to move easier.
"We do know that this lizard lived near to water and we think it likely that they could swim even though they primarily lived on land. This would make sense as a pregnant lizard would be less constrained by carrying offspring – she’d be able to escape into water if a hungry dinosaur came along!” she added. More information: A gravid lizard from the Cretaceous of China and the early history of squamate viviparity, by Yuan Wang and Susan E. Evans, Naturwissenschaft, DOI:10.1007/s00114-011-0820-1

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The 'Cheetah', or Mac OS X version 10.0, was the first of Apple's big cat-themed versions of Mac OS X. Released in 2001, the new operating system marked a strong deviation from the Classic Mac OS with a completely new code base, changing the style of the desktop as well as the system of memory management. Although reviews were not quite as good as one would expect (users complained of missing features and issues with its performance) 'Cheetah' was noteworthy for its overall stability as an operating system. Unlike all later releases of Mac OS X, the cat code-name name was not used in promoting it.

There’s a lot to like about HP’s new TouchPad – but not enough says Matt Warman.

Lining up next to offerings from Apple, Samsung, Motorola and Acer, yet another tablet launches tomorrow. The latest addition to the blister pack is HP’s TouchPad but this is a tablet like no other. It works in a different way to rivals because it runs on a new operating system, called WebOS.

Unfortunately for HP, although early reviews, including my own, said that there was a lot to like about the TouchPad, the overwhelming consensus was that this device is not yet really finished. Its wireless charging is impressive, for instance, as is its overall interface, but it doesn’t feel as fast or as slick as Apple’s excellent iPad or its closest rival, the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The TouchPad, nonetheless, shows real signs of potentially offering a real alternative in the future. The marketing and development might of HP – a company that makes an awful lot more than printers – will ensure the device is around for some time to come, and serious competition for Apple and Google can only be a good thing.

It’s unfortunate that American retailers, however, are already having to discount the TouchPad, and that the announcement of a new, faster model looks like fixing a problem rather than announcing an upgrade.

The current device, however, feels solid, albeit slightly plasticky in the hand. At 740g, it’s slightly heavier than an Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab, although perfectly portable enough. But turn on the TouchPad and it’s all about registering for an HP account, agreeing to terms and conditions and generally going through a painfully corporate palaver. Is this as bad as plugging a new iPad into iTunes? Probably not, but it certainly doesn’t feel magical.
Perhaps it would be perfectly forgivable if WebOS, the operating system that HP bought from Palm, lived up to the hype. And indeed there is a lot to like. In many ways the TouchPad rewrites – reinscribes? – the tablet handbook. Gone is the homescreen with icons and widgets indicating programmes or services. Instead, there’s a desktop that is basically just a staging post each of the apps the TouchPad runs. So press the home button and each ‘card’ is arrayed in a line. Swipe up to close or tap to select. If you’re writing an email message, the message gets a new ‘card’ so you can also refer back to your inbox. This is progress, compared to other tablets.
But is it enough when the email app itself takes five seconds or so to grind into action every time you fire it up? When other apps take more like 10 seconds? This doesn’t sound like long, but other tablets don’t keep you hanging around. And is it enough when, inexplicably, the TouchPad decided to duplicate my inbox nine times, offering a range of different unread message counts? These may all be teething troubles. When the TouchPad works, it does work very well.
Indeed, the wireless charging option – simply stand the TouchPad on its stand and it charges quickly and simply – is really impressive. The idea, coming soon, of printing from the TouchPad simply by touching it on a printer is attractive too. This underlines HP’s power to get some things spectacularly right.

A more precise manufacturing method will help as electronics shrink ever smaller.

Chip stack: This illustration shows the layers that make up a gate in a 22-nanometer transistor. The white balls on the bottom are silicon. The light blue balls in the middle are silicon dioxide molecules; the larger turquoise balls higher up are hafnium oxide; and the yellow balls are nitrogen atoms.
Credit: Applied Materials.Applied Materials, the world's leading supplier of manufacturing equipment to chipmakers, has announced a new system for making one of the most critical layers of the transistors found in logic circuits.
Applied Materials' new tool, announced at the Semicon West conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, deposits a critical layer in transistors one atom at a time, providing unprecedented precision.
As chipmakers scale transistors down to ever-smaller sizes, enabling speedier and more power-efficient electronics, atomic-scale manufacturing precision is a growing concern. The first chips with transistors just 22 nanometers in size are going into production this year, and at that size, even the tiniest inconsistencies can mean that a chip intended to sell at a premium must instead be used for low-end gadgetry.
Transistors are made up of multiple layers: an active silicon material topped with an interfacing layer and then a layer of a material called a dielectric, which makes up the "gate" that switches the transistor on and off.
Applied Materials sells equipment for depositing these layers, called the gate stack, on top of silicon wafers. In the switch from today's 32-nanometer to the next generation of 22-nanometer transistors, it's become trickier to make the gate. The interface and dielectric layers both have to get thinner, and the behavior of the layers can be affected by tiny flaws where the materials touch. And as the layers get thinner, tiny flaws can be magnified even more than in larger transistors made from thicker layers.
Manufacturing accuracy will be even more important in the next-generation three-dimensional transistors that chipmaker Intel will begin producing later this year. In these devices, the active area is a raised strip that the interface and gate layers contact on three sides. This increased area of contact helps these devices perform better, but it also means an increased vulnerability to flaws.
The process uses atomic-layer deposition, or ALD, which lays down a single atomic layer of the dielectric at a time. This method is more expensive, but it's become necessary, says Atif Noori, global product manager of Applied Materials' ALD division. For the heart of the transistor—the gate—to work, "you have to make sure you're putting all the atoms right where you want them."
One source of inconsistencies in microchips is exposure to air. In Applied Materials' new tool, the entire process of depositing the gate stack is done in a vacuum, one wafer at a time. Making the gate stack entirely under a vacuum also leads to a 5 to 10 percent increase in the speed at which electrons travel through the transistor; this can translate into power savings or faster processing. Ordinarily, there's significant variation in the amount of power it takes to turn on a given transistor on a chip; manufacturing under a vacuum tightens that distribution by 20 to 40 percent.

The advance could lead to motion sensors showing up in running shoes and tennis rackets.

Cell phones and many other mobile devices now come packed with sensors capable of tracking them as they move. The digital compasses, gyroscopes, and accelerometers embedded in such devices have spawned a wide range of location-based services, as well as novel ways of controlling mobile gadgets—for instance, with a shake or a flick. Now a new way of making these sensors could make such technology smaller and cheaper.

The advance could also result in motion sensors appearing in many more devices and objects, including running shoes or tennis rackets, says Nigel Drew of the Barcelona, Spain-based Baolab Microsystems, which developed the new technology.

Baolab has made a new kind of digital compass using a simpler manufacturing method. The technology will appear in GPS devices next year, says Drew. The company has also made prototype accelerometers and gyroscopes, and plans to combine all three types of sensor on the same chip.

Conventional digital compasses are made using what's called complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor manufacturing, the most common method for making microchips and electronic control circuitry. But such compasses include structures such as magnetic field concentrators that need to be added after the chip is made, which adds complexity and cost. "The fundamental difference is that [our compass is] made entirely within the standard CMOS," says Drew.

This is possible because the compass exploits a phenomenon called the Lorentz force. Most commercial digital compasses rely on a different phenomenon, called the Hall Effect, which works by running a current through a conductor and measuring changes in voltage caused by the Earth's magnetic field.

The Lorentz force, in contrast, happens when a magnetic field generates a force on a conducting material when a current is flowing through it. A device can determine the magnetic field by measuring the displacement of an object upon which this force is acting.

In Baolab's chips, a nanoscale micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) is etched out of a conventional silicon chip. This nano-MEMS device consists of an aluminum mass suspended by springs. When a device drives a current through the mass, any magnetic fields present will exert a force on the mass and affect its resonance. A pair of metal plates that flank the mass will detect these changes. A device can they measure the magnetic field in one direction by noting minuscule changes in the capacitance of these plates. Using a set of three of these sensors, the device can determine direction of the Earth's magnetic field, and hence it's orientation.

Will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation spur it to contribute to FOSS? Thoughts on Technology blogger Jeff Hoogland hopes so. "At the very least I think it is a sign that Meego will be appearing at some point as an in-car operating system," he said. "Here is to hoping Meego can eventually give the pseudo-Linux Android a run for its money."

It's hard to keep up with all the companies joining The Linux Foundation these days, but recently one jumped on board whose name threw a collective hush over the Linux blogosphere.

Toyota, that is -- none other than the planet's largest automobile manufacturer in terms of both sales and production.
Is there really anything else to say? Linux, you're on top of the world.'The Flexibility We Require'
"Linux gives us the flexibility and technology maturity we require to evolve our In-Vehicle-Infotainment and communications systems to address the expectations of our customers," said Kenichi Murata, a project general manager with Toyota. "The Linux Foundation provides us with a neutral forum in which we can collaborate with the world's leading technology companies on open innovation that accelerates that evolution."
Toyota joined the foundation as a full-fledged gold member, in fact, making it clear that it's betting big on the open source operating system.
Did Linux bloggers take note? You bet your favorite dashboard computing device they did. 'It Means There's No Stopping Linux'
Embedded entertainment systems have actually been "a strong area for Linux for quite some time," Travers pointed out. "This is hardly a new frontier, but rather a logical expansion of where Linux has been going for quite a while."
At the same time, of course, "this is a win for Linux," he added. "It demonstrates continued strong performance in this market and continued viability for Linux here."Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza took a similar view.
"This one is almost too easy, but I'll go there anyway," Espinoza said. "Obviously it means there's no stopping Linux." 'A Great Tool for Embedded Systems'
Blogger Robert Pogson's first car was a Toyota, he told Linux Girl.
"It used analogue computers and I could pry a module apart, make some measurement and replace parts with a soldering iron," he recounted. "Times have changed and Toyota has long ago seen the benefit of digital computers and control systems."
Linux is "a great tool for embedded systems, communication, documentation, navigation, control, logging, monitoring and entertainment," Pogson explained. "Toyota is wise to rely on such well-tested and open standard software to improve the bottom line, increase performance and to make their vehicles more attractive to consumers."